Winter Child
by Rebecca Redd
Summary: Grad student Antonia Carroll loves dark poetry but studies astrophysics. When her work for Jane Foster makes her Loki's target, the worlds of science and dark romance collide, leaving Toni bewitched by a man whose heart may be as black and as cold as his magic.


**Author's Note: I came up with the idea for this fic before The Avengers was released, so for now it's just consistent with Thor. However, I'm hoping to find a clever way to entwine this story with the plots of Avengers and Thor 2. We'll see… Anyway, tell me if you see any errors or typos, and please review to let me know what you think!**

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Chapter One

Antonia Carroll could feel the slight dizziness that meant she had been working for too long without food. "Just a few more minutes," she muttered to herself, unconsciously uncapping and recapping a pen several times while she reread her equation. She had promised Jane that she would be finished the calculations by noon.

Antonia had never slowed Jane down before, and she didn't want to start then, especially since the project had such personal significance to Jane. Since the appearance of Thor three months earlier, they had been thrust into entirely new scientific territory, the sort of stuff that even the most optimistic grad student in astrophysics would never have dared to dream of working on. The term "groundbreaking" didn't cover it. It was thrilling, but it also meant that they were all a little out of their depth. Even understanding, on a purely theoretical level, the work that they were doing took a tremendous conceptual adjustment; nothing that any of her classes at the University of Chicago had prepared her for. Like her father before her, who had been a prominent physicist, Antonia was a slow and methodical perfectionist, making no jumps and leaving no gaps, not moving on to the next concept or equation until she was reciting the old one in her sleep. It was usually a good thing, even if it made her a little slower than she would have liked, but on the wormhole project it had cost her many precious hours. She had been working on the equation since mid-afternoon of the day before, and had stayed up all night in the office, fueled by coffee and her inner masochist, occasionally aware of Jane spending a similarly sleepless night performing experiments in the lab down the hall.

It was just half an hour before the deadline, and she had finished the real work and was simply copying it onto a fresh sheet of paper so that it was legible. Jane would be by to pick it up soon, and then it would probably be a day or so before Jane and Erik had finished the next stage of research and there was any more work for Antonia to do. That was good, because she needed food, a shower, and some sleep. Once she had caught up on her shut-eye she had to work on her dissertation and write back to her adviser about the conference at M.I.T that he wanted her to attend. There was no way that she would be able to go, not when Jane was so close to a breakthrough.

There was a knock on the door of the office, and Antonia nearly jumped right out of her chair. Yep, she'd definitely had too much coffee. "I'm just polishing it now, Jane," she called, "but you are _early_. We've talked about this before," she added teasingly. They had. Jane was naturally determined and driven, but since Thor had returned to Asgard, she'd been like a possessed woman. For the first week or so after the disappearance of the bridge, Jane had worked herself, and the rest of the team, half to death. She'd give Antonia and Erik a week to collect data or test an experiment, and then she'd ask for results two days later. Just when it was getting unbearable, they'd started making progress, and Jane had calmed down significantly.

"That's nice," someone responded, "but I'm not Jane," and Darcy peeked around the door. "So, have the brilliant scientists triumphed again?"

"Um, sort of," Antonia answered, rubbing her aching head as Darcy entered, a tray of Styrofoam coffee cups in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

"Jeez, you look awful Toni." One thing about Darcy, you could always rely on her to be honest.

"I'll be okay," Antonia said, painstakingly copying another line of the equation. "A little food and some sleep and I'll be good as new."

"Good thing I brought bagels then," Darcy said, shaking the bag. "You haven't been at it all night, have you?"

"Yep," Antonia answered with some satisfaction as she finished copying her work. For a minute she was too exhausted to even lean back in her chair, then the pen dropped from her slightly shaky fingers and she sighed. Astrophysics all-nighters were very painful and sort of agonizingly exhilarating, rather the way Antonia imagined warfare or childbirth.

There was a sharp rap on the door and Jane entered with the usual preoccupied frown on her face. It lifted a little when Darcy waved, but reappeared as Jane studied the sheets of paper that Toni slid across the table to her. She didn't say anything, but turned to go, deep in thought.

She was almost to the door when she seemed to remember that she was holding in her hand the product of hundreds of hours of painstaking work, the last twenty of them completed in one sitting punctuated only by rushed bathroom breaks. Jane turned to face Antonia. "Nicely done, Toni, really great work. Thank you." She sounded tired, but sincere, and Toni barely had a chance to nod before Jane stepped back out into the hall.

"Now that woman," Darcy said as the door closed, "is obsessed."

"Well, it can't be easy," Toni answered, twisting in her chair to stretch her back. She was a little alarmed to hear three loud pops from the general vicinity of her spine. "Her career and the love of her life are both riding on this. Talk about pressure."

Darcy nodded, sliding the bag of bagels across the table. "Coffee?"

"Yuck, no. I'm way over my caffeine limit already, just a bottle of water, please, I'm going to eat quickly and then get home so I can crash."

"I'll drive you," Darcy volunteered. "I'm headed home anyway, I left some reports there and I need to fax them to S.H.I.E.L.D today, now that they're funding us we're supposed to keep them updated." Darcy and Toni were roommates, renting a modest three bedroom house along with a geology grad student named Mike. It wasn't a palace, but it was cheap and the three of them got along fairly well.

Antonia was in her third year of Ph.D work, and she'd heard about the internship in Puente Antiguo a few weeks _after_ the application deadline. She'd contacted Jane anyway, hoping maybe to work with her sometime in the future. As it happened, Jane had received only one application, Darcy's, and Darcy was a political science major with minimal knowledge of physics, so Jane agreed to take Antonia on as well. At the time all of her professors had advised against it. Jane had been a well-respected astrophysicist— _before_ she'd started working on some extremely controversial theories, and then vanished into the deserts of New Mexico. Since then she had been scoffed at by the rest of the academic community, and that was the main reason why such a brilliant scientist had received so few applications for her internship program.

Antonia's academic adviser had told her that working with Jane Foster could very easily end her career before it began, but something in Antonia's gut had told her that Jane wasn't as crazy as some rival physicists claimed. Antonia had done her research thoroughly, combing through all of Jane's early work: her dissertation, her work on the age of stars, her theories on black holes, and it was all solid. Jane's theories and calculations were sound, reached by taking conceptual risks and then backing them up with more than enough research. If someone with Jane's mind had begun chasing storms in the desert, then there was a reason. So Antonia had taken the internship, and joined Jane and Darcy in New Mexico.

It was delaying her completion of the Ph.D program. Antonia couldn't finish her coursework at the University of Chicago while she was interning in New Mexico, so she was writing her dissertation in her free time instead. However, since all of her work with Jane was off-limits for her dissertation (being a top-secret matter of national security, of course) it meant that she had to do separate research on her own time.

Antonia didn't mind though. She had arrived just a month before Jane had discovered Thor, and through him, other dimensions. It wasn't just science anymore. It was national security, life and death, history, mythology, the kind of work that didn't stay at work, but came home with Antonia, preoccupied her while she showered, flooded her mind as soon as she fell asleep and haunted her dreams. Despite her talent for math and physics, Antonia had always been a little bit lukewarm about her career in astrophysics. She had been pushed in the direction of physics by her father, who had been determined that one of his five children had to follow in his footsteps. If she had been left to her own devices, she probably would have gone into English. Rather than a grad student in astrophysics, she would have been a student of creative writing and a starving poet. She'd rather liked the idea of being a starving poet, actually, it appealed to the inner romantic that she rarely indulged.

But since she'd come to New Mexico, she'd discovered the kind of passion that she'd previously associated only with art and poetry. Determination and the desire to learn had sustained her through countless all-nighters in school. Now, with a far more demanding schedule, a kind of strange, single-minded euphoria kept exhaustion at bay. She'd always been a whiz at science, she'd always liked it, but it wasn't until wormholes, Jane Foster, and Thor, that she'd fallen in love with it.


End file.
